This invention relates to rocket missiles and especially to means for improving the ballistic accuracy of tube-launched rockets.
Military establishments are turning more and more to missiles such as rockets for ground-to-ground, air-to-air, air-to-ground weapons as the solution to their military needs. To stabilize the flight of such rockets, fins are employed, usually at the nozzle end of the rocket.
Rockets which are not spin stabilized, because they are not given spin from the start of the flight, are inaccurate, i.e., they may have large dispersions. Ballistic dispersion is the amount of spread in the striking points of missiles at a given target from the same aiming point and is a measure of the accuracy of a given type of missile. It is obvious that absolute accuracy is the desired object of weapon makers and thus the less dispersion a missile has the more accurate and desirable it is.
The prior art has reduced dispersion appreciably in spinning the rocket during the thrusting phase by utilizing stabilizers which are customarily retactably mounted or folded about the rocket fuselage and adapted to be unfolded by spring action, centrifugal force or both when the missile emerges from its launch tube. Such prior art devices are exemplified by U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,964,696, 3,952,970, issued to Orzechowski et al and U.S. Pat. No. 3,260,205 to Dietrich. These prior art devices suffer in that they are complicated, expensive and difficult to manufacture. Furthermore inasmuch as the prior art devices are complicated their reliability leaves much to be desired.